The Goddess’s Favorite Creepy Movie Scenes, or Ankhs for the Memories

29 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 1 Comment

I have to admit that, as a rule, I’m kinda over vampires these days. Like all self-respecting darklings, of course, I was all about Anne Rice back in the day, and my first (terrible, unpublished) novel was actually a painfully angsty vampire love story along those same lines. If only I had known that years later, someone would write Twilight and make all the money in the world, I might not have been so quick to shame-toss my manuscript in the garbage, but on such lack of foresight doth the vagaries of fate turn, or something.

On the other hand, though, as an unrepentant goth chick for nigh on three decades, I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t be seduced by a genuinely great vampire film, especially if it was stylish as fuck, starred three of the best-looking people on the planet at the time, and boasted an opening scene featuring one of my favorite bands performing the grandaddy of all goth-rock anthems. By now you should have guessed that I’m talking about this gothic wet dream right here:

And who will we be having for dinner this evening?

Tony Scott’s The Hunger (loosely based on an okay novel by Whitley “I Was Anal Probed by Extraterrestrials” Strieber) has been dogged by criticisms of style over substance pretty much since its release in 1983, but in my opinion, time has been very kind to it, and I would happily defend it as one of the very best vampire films of the 80s. Not only was it gorgeous to look at and chock full of fantastic acting performances, but it also took the tired vampire schtick and did something fairly original and arty with it (though of course much of the concept of interpreting vampire tropes through the lens of modern genetic science was present in Strieber’s book).

The Hunger is the story of beautiful, centuries-old vampire Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) and her understandable but ultimately cruelly selfish quest to find a companion who will be with her forever. Her latest consort, John (David Bowie) has been with her for two hundred years, but John soon learns that Miriam’s promises of eternal youth were a lie when he begins to rapidly age, due to an apparent incompatibility between human and vampire blood that takes centuries to manifest.

Oh, did I neglect to mention that you’d spend eternity as a shambling living corpse? My bad, honey bunch.

John and Miriam enlist the services of cutting-edge gerontologist Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon) in an attempt to reverse the aging process, but all to no avail. After the feeble John kills the couple’s young music student, hoping that her blood will revitalize him, Miriam tenderly carries his still-living but disintegrating carcass into the attic. There she places him in a coffin along with her other former lovers, all of whom are enduring the same living death. It is this aspect of Miriam’s character that makes her monstrous: she is so desperate for companionship that she will strategically neglect to mention that the vampire gift she is bestowing comes with eternal life, yes, but not eternal youth. She will also keep her lovers alive and with her forever, even though they are suffering terribly.

Grief-stricken and lonely after John’s confinement, Miriam then sets her sights on Sarah and begins to groom her as her next companion. The pair exchange blood during a languid, gauzy, and super-hot sex scene, but Sarah discovers soon enough what Miriam’s gift entails. At first she refuses to accept her new blood-drinking nature, preferring to starve herself of the sustaining red stuff, but eventually her willpower fails her and she ends up killing her boyfriend Tom and feeding on him. Miriam thinks that Sarah is now on board with the whole vampire thing, but Sarah’s steely resolve is such that she attempts to cut her own throat with Miriam’s purpose-made ankh pendant rather than spend the next few hundred years at the vampire’s side. The distraught Miriam attempts to save her, but evidently Sarah’s attempted self-sacrifice has rallied the troops, so to speak; all of Miriam’s rotting former lovers rise from their coffins, kill Miriam, and fall to dust upon the floor, finally finding the sweet release of death that they had been denied for so long.

Exactly what about this whole scenario doesn’t appeal to you???

There is then an odd coda to the film that doesn’t really make any sense in terms of the story, as we see briefly that Sarah has survived her suicide attempt and is now living as a vampire with a male and female consort of her own. Susan Sarandon has reported that she was not happy with this tacked-on ending, as it negated the whole arc of her character and the point of her rebellion, but there was little she could do about it, since the producers apparently wished to leave the film open-ended in case they wanted to make a sequel down the line (sigh). The scene is only a few seconds long and doesn’t spoil the film, but it is kind of a WTF moment.

All that aside, though, let me take a moment to rhapsodize about all the great things this film does. Casting the impossibly beautiful and elegant Deneuve as a vampire was a stroke of genius, as her quiet gravitas and cold yet seductive grace lend a sense of timelessness to her portrayal that makes it very easy to believe, not only that she has been alive for millennia, but also that she could easily embody the conflict of genuine loving feeling existing alongside such fiendish cruelty. Susan Sarandon’s character is a perfect counterpoint, a thoroughly modern woman whose pragmatism and independence is the polar opposite of Miriam’s needy heartlessness.

OMG, stop being so pretty.

Bowie is likewise great as the doomed companion, putting in a restrained and perfectly balanced performance in which the struggle between his deep love for Miriam and his anger at her betrayal of him are readily apparent.

At least Ann Magnuson got to be felt up by David Bowie before her tragic exsanguination.

The set design is also gorgeous, soft-focused and romantic, with billowing white curtains, shafts of dim light illuminating flocks of doves, and the spectacularly old-world interiors of the Blaylocks’ tastefully appointed New York townhouse brilliantly contrasted against the sterile environment of Sarah’s medical clinic. I’ve heard many people complain that The Hunger looked more like a music video than a movie, and I understand that assessment, but I feel as though the entire look of the film is a crucial part of its enduring charm. Its aesthetic flair was certainly one of the things that first drew me to it in the 1980s, and to be frank I think it looks even better now that we’ve had more than thirty years’ perspective on it.

Holy shit, I would live in this house so hard.

The fact that the film also has such a dynamite opening, with the vampiric Peter Murphy in a cage intoning “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” with his band Bauhaus, is simply the pitch-black icing on the darkly glamorous cake that is this movie.

Undead to the third power.

Unlike many other vampire films of the period, The Hunger is more concerned with artistic visuals and exploring the relationships of the characters than it is with outright horror or gore. That’s not to say that there aren’t some intensely bloody scenes, and the final shots of Miriam’s ancient, skeletal companions rising up against her are fairly horrific, but fans of more in-your-face horror may find the film far too cerebral for their tastes, and that’s as it should be. Different strokes, and all that.

WHATCHOO TALKIN’ ABOUT GODDESS? (SORRY, HAD TO.)

Until next time, Goddess out.

A Trailer for My Fabulous Graphic Novel “The Tenebrist”

23 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

I’ve used some of my admittedly lackluster video-fu to make this short trailer for my illustrated/graphic designed/collage-type book The Tenebrist. It’s a somewhat fictionalized account of the tragic (and murderous) career of the mad genius painter Caravaggio, and it’s illustrated with a bunch of his gorgeously luminous paintings. Watch the trailer, if you please, and then buy your brand-spanking new copy right here. Thanks ever so much.

The Goddess Sings the Praises of “Stories That Scared Even Me”

21 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 4 Comments

There is nothing I love so much as a well-told and terrifying short story. Sure, novels are great, and can conjure an entire world that you can lose yourself in for days or weeks at a time; but there is something about that sharp jolt from a short tale that can be read all in one sitting (though perhaps not forgotten so quickly as that). Short stories are my preferred medium for writing as well, and I hope one day to be able to create something even partially approaching the nightmarish impact of some of my favorite short stories of all time: Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model.” Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One.” Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” H. Russell Wakefield’s “The Triumph of Death.” Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.”

When I was a wee Goddess, one of my very favorite things was to go to the library and check out one of the giant horror anthologies that flew under the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” banner. A shit-ton of them were published, and I think I probably read them all during my formative years. The stories contained therein were a huge influence on little nugget me, who was already starting to show a penchant for the literary and the horrific. My grandfather, knowing of my predilections, gave me one of the anthologies out of the vast, dusty collection of books he kept in teetering stacks on the floor of his creepy, overstuffed house. I still have it, though its pages have fallen completely out of its binding from the many rereads it underwent over the years. It was published in 1967, only five years before I was born. It was called Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me. Even the title intrigued me! THESE STORIES SCARED ALFRED HITCHCOCK, YOU GUYS. THAT’S HARDCORE.

Sadly, this incredible collection is now out of print, but used copies can be found pretty easily, and if you’re into a lot of the horror fiction that came out from around the 1920s to the 1960s, I would recommend you pick up a copy, because it is the most consistently great horror anthology I’ve ever read. There isn’t a dud among the 25 tales featured, and there isn’t a story in there that isn’t excellent at the very least. The collection has something for damn near everyone: Weird monsters (Fishhead, Men Without Bones, It, The Troll, Out of the Deeps)! Dystopias (Not With a Bang, X Marks the Pedwalk)! Creeping suburban horror (Tough Town, One of the Dead)! Jack the Ripper (The Knife)! Vampires (The Real Thing)! Nazis (Evening at the Black House)! I’ll provide a full table of contents at the bottom of the post, if you’re curious.

It’s difficult to choose my five favorite stories out of such an embarrassment of riches, but for the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to attempt it. Wish me luck.

“A Death in the Family” by Miriam Allen deFord

I briefly mentioned this story before in my post about season two of “Masters of Horror,” and I also mentioned that it had been turned into a partial episode of “Night Gallery.” It’s the tale of a lonely undertaker who has an entire “family” of stolen, preserved corpses in his basement to keep him company. His secluded little world is disrupted, however, when kidnappers drop the murdered body of a beautiful little girl on his doorstep, and he must wrestle with the decision of either doing the right thing by the girl’s family, or adding the perfect daughter to his own. The whole tale just oozes a cold, chilling atmosphere, and the helpless empathy you feel with the bereft protagonist gives this one a real emotional punch.

“Party Games” by John Burke

Since I was about the same age and personality type as the main protagonist of this story, the quietly sly Simon, this story really resonated with me when I first encountered it. Fairly violent, but in a pleasingly understated and very British way, the story follows the tragic arc of Simon’s ill-fated birthday party, and examines the vengeful depths that might be lurking just below the surface of even the shyest and most innocuous of little boys.

“Curious Adventure of Mr. Bond” by Nugent Barker

Really more of a novella than a short story, this tale is told in three rough parts. Mr. Bond is a traveler who goes to a succession of three oddly-named inns, and slowly begins to discover the terrible secret connection between them. I like this one a great deal because it has sort of an eerie fairy-tale feel, and the gruesome outcome is satisfyingly icky.

“The Road to Mictlantecutli” by Adobe James

I’m always down for a good devil story, and this one takes a fairly original and somewhat dreamlike path. Saturated in the atmosphere of the American Southwest and shrouded in Aztec myth, this story of an unsympathetic fugitive from the hangman who has his own ghastly “Hotel California” experience out in the desert is blood-red perfection.

“Journey to Death” by Donald E. Westlake

The premise is simple: Two men are trapped in an airtight game room when their cruise ship plunges to the bottom of the ocean. But the execution is skin-crawling, the tension palpable, and the resolution grim. A shining example of taking a bare-bones frame and building a towering edifice of terror upon it.

And here, as promised, is the entire list of stories featured in this fantastic collection. Check it out; you won’t be disappointed. Until next time, Goddess out.

“Fishhead” by Irvin S. Cobb
“Camera Obscura” by Basil Copper
“A Death in the Family” by Miriam Allen deFord
“Men Without Bones” by Gerald Kersh
“Not with a Bang” by Damon Knight
“Party Games” by John Burke
“X Marks the Pedwalk” by Fritz Leiber
“Curious Adventure of Mr. Bond” by Nugent Barker
“Two Spinsters” by E. Phillips Oppenheim
“The Knife” by Robert Arthur
“The Cage” by Ray Russell
“It” by Theodore Sturgeon
“Casablanca” by Thomas M. Disch
“The Road to Mictlantecutli” by Adobe James
“Guide to Doom” by Ellis Peters
“The Estuary” by Margaret St. Clair
“Tough Town” by William Sambrot
“The Troll” by T. H. White
“Evening at the Black House” by Robert Somerlott
“One of the Dead” by William Wood
“The Master of the Hounds” by Algis Budrys
“The Real Thing” by Robert Specht
“Journey to Death” by Donald E. Westlake
“The Candidate” by Henry Slesar
“Out of the Deeps” by John Wyndham

Excerpt From an Untitled and As-Yet-Uncompleted Erotic Horror Story

21 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Hi again, kids. This right here is a story I started working on a few months ago, but for some reason haven’t got around to finishing yet. I probably will finish it at some point, and eventually I’d like to feature it in another short story collection I want to have put together this year, but in the meantime, read the excerpt and tell me what you think! Suggestions for plot twists and titles are also welcome.

Also, kindly remember I have an ongoing Patreon campaign to raise funds for this writing thang I do. Even pledging just a couple bucks a month will be a big help, so if you like what I do, then consider contributing! Please and thank you. And now, the main feature.

Flyaway hair? Stand Head and Shoulders above the rest. (Sorry.)

It all came out through the holes, wet and glistening silver like strands of spider silk. It’s her again. How could that be? James began to pull more quickly, his heartbeat accelerating. In moments the palm of his hand was crisscrossed with the stuff, metallic yet somehow soft at the same time, its shafts clotted with black. James brought his hand up to his nose and took a heady sniff. He could smell the secretive tang of the below, that organic stench. He closed his eyes.

He didn’t know how long he sat that way, hunched over the bathtub, but he was suddenly brought out of his reverie by a banging on the door. “Hey, are you all right in there?”

He turned toward the voice. Shit. He’d almost forgotten. “I’m almost done. Be out in a minute.” He fumbled a plastic baggie out of the pocket of his sport coat and gently slipped a handful of the hair into it, giving it a final caress as he did so. He kept back a few fine strands that he rubbed between his fingers, relishing the feel of the drain-slime sloughing off in his hands. He then pursed his lips and drew the strands slowly into his mouth, using his tongue to swirl them around his teeth. Angel hair. He smiled.

With another glance at the bathroom door, he swallowed and stepped to the sink to wash his hands. His face in the mirror looked mostly normal to him, with just a hint of a devilish curl at the corner of his lips. He wiped his hands and opened the door. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“Oh, that’s all right.” The woman by the bathroom door was short and rotund, not at all the way he imagined the possessor of the hair would look. “I just got a little worried. Thought you were sick or something.”

“No, no. Just a little…something I ate. Would you like to see the upstairs now? I think you’ll really like the layout up there. Lots of natural light.”

The woman nodded and followed him as he mounted the steps and continued his seller’s spiel. As he spoke, his mind wandered to the hair in the drain, to the sensuous, glimmering impossibility of it. He patted his pocket to make sure the baggie was still there, the bag that he would add to the two other identical ones he had stashed away in the drawer of his bedside table at home. He asked himself again, How was it possible? Three different houses in different parts of town, and yet he had pulled the same woman’s hair from the three drains: same unusual silver-silk color and texture, same loamy scent of promise lurking beneath the pungent sewer-odor. Extraordinary.

****

That evening, he sat in his dim, cramped office, his sport coat hung over the back of his chair, a forgotten cup of coffee beside him. Plastic baggies made a milky-slick grid before him on the faux wood desktop, and his hands trembled slightly as he held them there, inches above the expanse, quivering in anticipation of the first touch.

The bags were ordered along a spectrum, with the palest blondes at the upper left positions gradually shading toward the severest blacks at the lower right. The three strange silvers occupied their own place at the very top of the grid, and it was these that James gravitated toward with his shaking fingers, prolonging his delicious agony by stroking the plastic of the baggie briefly, so briefly, then pulling away.

At last he could stand it no longer, and snatched up the baggie containing today’s acquisition. He pulled apart the seal and plunged his hand greedily inside. The hair had dried since this afternoon, and its texture was so delicate that he could barely feel it on the skin of his palm. He brought it out and held the strands under the desk lamp, watching the light play across the shaft of the hair like a prism, like fiber optics. He held it there for a long time, staring, transfixed. He itched to bring it toward his lips, to feel it coiling its way down his throat to nest in his stomach, but…

Something was wrong. He forced his gaze away from the silver hair and scanned the plastic grid, the neat squares containing their multi-hued filaments. There was still that charge, that longing, but it was different than before, less intense. He frowned. Carefully, he placed the silver hair back into its bag and placed it at the top of the grid. It wouldn’t do. This was something special, something that couldn’t be treated with the same ritual. The three baggies lay there, taunting him deliciously, marriageable women amidst a sea of cheap whores.

He shook his head, both aroused and disturbed. He snatched up one of the other baggies from the center of the grid without really looking at it. What did it matter? He drew the mouse-brown strands from the bag and let them hang between his fingers. With his other hand, he unzipped his jeans. His erection was tentative, his confusion over having to settle for a cheap whore for tonight stymieing the usual hard throb. He took his cock in his hand and stroked, the fingers of his other hand caressing the substandard hair. His thoughts raced. The silver hair, there on the desk. Perhaps he should look at that, think of that while he dallied with the inferior specimen. His cock immediately responded as his eyes focused on those three baggies, and he groaned as the motions of his hand grew faster. As the inevitable explosion drew near, he stuffed the brown hair in his mouth and barely even bothered to move it around with his tongue before swallowing it just as he released his seed across his pants, the desktop, the array of baggies. The hair tickled as it made its way down his esophagus, and he sat back in his chair, breathing hard, watching his erection wilt, feeling the pleasant tinge of the air conditioning on his damp flesh.

****

The house had been empty for several months, and James had shown it to four prospective buyers so far. None had made an offer. James wasn’t sure exactly why; he didn’t see anything particularly wrong with the place that a little elbow grease couldn’t fix. The plumbing was old, and gave the rooms a vaguely dank odor, but James found the smell strangely comforting, and was always bothered when his clients wrinkled their noses at it as they toured around. It was a perfectly lovely house otherwise, small but pleasantly secretive, painted in cool watery hues.

He unlocked the door and went inside, setting his phone and all his papers on the kitchen bar just off the living room. He was meeting a new client today who had seemed intensely interested in buying, and he was determined to get at least an offer, even if he had to force the woman to sign on the dotted line.

He made a quick survey of the place, dusting off surfaces with his hand and picking up dead bugs and stray leaves. He paused on the threshold of the master bathroom, where the wet smell was the strongest, and breathed deeply. He could go in and check the drain, it would only take a moment…he had been in this house before and collected specimens, but there were always a few strands he’d missed. His memory drifted back to the silver hair in the baggies at home, and his fingers twitched. Only a moment…

There was a gentle knock on the front door. James straightened his back. His cock was stirring against his thigh, straining against the front of his khakis, and James quickly tried to calm himself, glancing down to ensure that the bulge was not as obvious as it felt. The knock came again, and James waited another few beats before heading purposefully down the hall, hoping he looked presentable.

“Ms. Dell?” he said as he opened the door. It occurred to him much later that he had known, seconds before he saw who was standing on the doorstep, that it would be her.

“James,” she said, immediately familiar. She was framed like a portrait against a late autumn landscape, the black tree branches in the yard seeming to spread out behind her like the clawed hands of a giant, presenting her to him. The afternoon sun on her silvery hair made it ripple like liquid fire.

He stared. She seemed content to stand and be stared at.

After an age, he wordlessly stepped aside and let her enter the house. She brought the silver glow of the outside in with her, and she also brought a scent that seemed to mesh with the clammy tang of the house, and the two scents combined into a dark perfume of dirt and sweat and marshland that made James dizzy.

Ms. Dell smiled at him, a deceptively distracted smile that nonetheless made him feel as though he had been penetrated by a laser. She began to amble about the living room, looking idly up and down, her black silk dress clinging to her flesh as she moved. He wanted to speak to her, but he was afraid of breaking the spell.

She disappeared into the shadows of the hallway, and James stood there stupidly watching the place where she had been, as if her aura and underground scent had left a ghost of her behind, and then came her throaty voice thrumming from the very walls. “Are you coming?” she asked.

He stumbled down the hall, his heart clenching. He didn’t see her at first; there was only the shifting diffused light from the windows making dancing patterns on the water-blue walls, but then there was a hint of movement off to his right, and of course there she was, standing before the bathroom sink and gazing intently at her reflection. She turned her head slightly as he entered. His mouth was dry. She was so very close, and the smell of her was heady, mingling with the stench from the plumbing, the stench that always clung to the hair she had left for him to find in the drains.

She placed her bone-pale hands on her hips and slid the fabric of her dress upwards, bending over the sink as she did so that the twin moons of her ass were just visible. James moved behind her, feeling as though his body was no longer anchored to the earth. Ms. Dell was still looking into the mirror, and now her eyes raised to meet his in the silver reflection of the two of them. Her eyes were black and bottomless, pipelines into the eternal. She waited.

James fumbled for a moment, and in the eerie silence the sound of his zipper freeing him was like a rip in spacetime. Then he was inside of her, and as he watched her face in the mirror he saw her lips part and emit a high, gurgling sigh, though her gaze never faltered, her unblinking eyes boring into him as he bore into her with heightening intensity.

As he neared climax, she arched her ass and pushed against him with terrible force. He clenched his teeth, trying to hold on as long as he could. She threw her head back so that her glorious silver hair flew out in a fan, and James snatched fistfuls of it as it cascaded toward him, curling his fingers and pulling her toward him with it, until he felt as though he would rend her in half. She made that startling cry again, that liquid burble, and then he lost it, howling in pleasurable agony, ripping twin skeins of hair from her head with his clenched fists as he came.

He withdrew from her and collapsed against the bathroom door, lowering his head so that he no longer had to stare into those reflected black eyes, which were still unwaveringly watching him even now. He glanced down at his hands, at the knotted silver strands like fine wire festooning his fingers. He longed to taste them one by one, to savor them on his lips and tongue, but he would not do it while she was watching, despite the strange intimacy they had just shared.

Ms. Dell straightened and smoothed her dress. James noticed a single pearl of semen on her inner thigh, and the sight made his head swim.

She turned toward him, and in James’s vision she almost seemed to waver, all blacks and whites like a projection from an old film. Then she spoke, and became solid again. “May I have a minute?”

James looked dumbly at her until she cut her eyes ever so slightly toward the door. Realization dawned, and he ducked his head in embarrassment. “Yes. Please,” he said hoarsely. He shuffled into the hall, chastened, and she closed the door gently after him.

Should he stand there and wait? What would happen now? Everything was surreal and dreamlike, though he was certain he was wide awake. He leaned slightly toward the bathroom door, but couldn’t hear anything at all. Then, suddenly aware that she could open the door at any moment and see him lurking there like a vulture, he wandered back down the hall and went into the kitchen to wait for her.

The light coming through the windows shifted further to the west and took on the sparkling cast of honey as the afternoon went lazily on. James had heard no sound from the bathroom for a long while, and at last he stole into the shadows of the hallway and pecked meekly at the door. “Ms. Dell?” He felt vaguely ridiculous that he did not know her first name.

Silence greeted him, and his skin prickled with cold. He called again, his voice blasphemy-loud. Very faintly, he thought he heard an aqueous echo, a bubble in a drain, but when he turned the knob and entered, the bathroom was empty.

The succulent wet smell of her still remained, and James leaned over the sink, mimicking the posture of Ms. Dell as he had fucked her. He stared into the mirror, almost expecting to see her black eyes looking back at him. But no, it was just his own haggard, bearded face, its blue eyes ringed with red.

Feeling another stirring in his loins, he pressed his face to the bottom of the sink, drawing all the below-stench up into his nostrils like a greedy eater. Frenzied, her pulled the drain stopper up and out into the sink basin, and saw that the shaft of the stopper was wrapped in a shining cocoon of silken silver hair.

****

The following day James had no pressing obligations, and as soon as his eyes opened he was out of bed and hurrying toward his office down the hall.

He would have believed that the entire experience with Ms. Dell had been a dream, if he didn’t have the twisted locks of her hair in a large baggie in his hand. He had slept with it under his pillow, stroking it with one hand while his other played frantically about inside his boxer shorts. Sometime during these pleasurable activities, he had hit upon a brilliant idea with what to do with Ms. Dell’s hair, something that he hoped would be worthy of her magnificence.

“The Expulsion”

20 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

“Thanks for calling CastOutCo, we’re steamin’ mad at demons. How can I help you?”

“I’m not sure whether I should be calling or not.”

Father Buck rolled his eyes, aiming another pencil at the ceiling tiles. “What seems to be the problem?”

“It’s my son. I don’t know where to turn…”

The woman started talking, and Buck made some peremptory notes, and then began doodling on the edges of his legal pad. The symptoms she was describing were fairly typical; Buck already had all the information he was likely to need, but it made the clients feel better if they were allowed to vent.

When the woman paused to take a breath, Buck jumped in. “We’re awfully swamped, but I think I can squeeze you in this afternoon at two-thirty, if that’s okay.” He glanced up at the wrestling calendar tacked to the wall of his cubicle; there was nothing written there.

“Thank you. Yes, as soon as possible.” Her voice was forceful and harsh through the phone, as though she really wanted to say, You’d better get your ass here yesterday, buster.

“See you then,” Buck said, and almost hung up, but then remembered to tack on, “Thanks for calling CastOutCo.” The woman had already rung off. Buck put the phone back in its cradle, hoping the manager hadn’t been listening in.

With a sigh, he buttoned up the shirt of his uniform, which looked like something a priest would wear if he moonlighted as a motorcycle mechanic; it was black, with a faux white collar and an embroidered name badge with a little orange cross stitched on it. Buck slid his feet off the desk and crammed his black cowboy hat onto his balding pate. He couldn’t hear a peep in the office; the other associates were probably sleeping or cruising the Internet for underage girls. Business had been tanking, and it was all thanks to Big Pharma—parents were generally unwilling to fork over obscene amounts of cash to an exorcist when they could just stuff their kid full of Ritalin.

Buck got up from his chair, causing the chair and his back to squeak in protest. He hoped this tinpot operation could stay afloat until he retired; he was too old to go pounding the pavement for work, and besides, banishing demons wasn’t really an in-demand skill in the job market these days. He sighed again, heavily, and glanced at his watch. If he left now, he’d probably have time to stop and get a beer.

At two-thirty-eight, after three beers and a bowl of nachos, Buck pulled his rickety Ford to the curb in front of the client’s house, which was a typical faceless suburban confection painted in trendy Mediterranean hues. There was a dark green minivan in the driveway, with a sticker on the back proclaiming that their kid was an Honor Student at Insufferable Brat Middle School, or some such crap. Buck scowled.

The woman had the door open before he’d even got all the way out of the car, and she looked exactly as he had expected her to: Pinched, too skinny, with meticulously styled brownish hair and high-waisted jeans. Buck smiled and raised a hand in greeting, but she just looked at him with a steely expression. He muttered under his breath as he retrieved his box of supplies from the back seat.

Once inside, the woman didn’t even offer a drink or so much as a how-do-you-do; she just marched through the maze of cream-colored hallways, leaving Buck to scuttle along behind her. She stopped on the threshold of what looked like a sitting room, and thrust her finger forward.

The boy sat stoutly in a red recliner, his feet dangling an inch or two from the floor. Behind him were the tangled wires and controls of a forgotten video game, and clutched in his hand was a half-eaten Ho-Ho. He considered his mother and the stranger with flat-lidded eyes.

“What’s the kid’s name?” Buck hissed out of the corner of his mouth.

“Logan,” the woman hissed back. Then she moved aside and let Buck into the room.

“What’s up, Logan?” Buck put his box casually on the floor at his feet. The boy glanced down at it, and then looked back at him. “Something going on I should know about?”

The kid burped, and Buck got a cloudy snootful of root beer and Ho-Ho filling and brimstone. “Who are you?” Logan asked.

I’m Spartacus, kid, who do you think? Buck smiled. “Just someone who wants to help you. My name’s Father Buck.” He wasn’t really a father to anyone or anything; he’d never even done that cheapo ordaining deal on the Internet. The titles were company policy.

Logan’s face puffed up like an egg sac and turned a livid shade of green. The exorcist ducked in case the kid was going to spew, but all that came out were words. “He doesn’t need any help, wretched human,” the kid croaked, in a voice rather reminiscent of intestinal gas. “I am in…um…complete control now.”

Buck pulled up a nearby chair and sat facing the boy. It looked like it might be a long afternoon. “And who, pray tell, might you be?”

Logan’s face deflated in an instant, and he was again a normal, contemptuous pre-teen. “You already know my name is Logan. Are you retarded or something?”

Buck sighed inwardly. The beer and nachos seemed to be having a neighborly dispute in his digestive system. “I know you’re Logan. I’m talking to the other person inside of you.”

Logan just looked at him quizzically, but then the swollen green face returned. “You’ll never free the child from our crutches…I mean clutches!” The shining red eyes glanced to the left, as though consulting an invisible someone standing just behind the recliner. Then they fixed on Buck again. “Try anything you want! Dunk me in a tank of holy water! Read me boring bits of the Bible! Stick a silver crucifix up my nose and…uh…call me Sally!” Another small burp escaped the demonic maw. “Oh! And…um…your mother wears army boots?”

On top of the indigestion, Buck’s head had begun to pound. This was exactly what he needed today; this demon was only a damn trainee. He had dealt with a few of them in his time; trainees were usually a bigger pain in the ass to exorcise than fully accredited demons. Buck reckoned it had to do with the trainees’ inexperience, their desperation to succeed at their first big possession. Trying to ignore his throbbing temples, Buck said, “Junior demon third class, I want to talk to your supervisor.”

The green face registered childlike surprise, and then quickly reverted to a grimace that was apparently supposed to be terrifying. “What are you talking about, pitiful human? I’m an all-powerful…what? No, I can do it… Oh, all right!” In an instant the petulant green visage dissolved into a much less human countenance, reddish and reptilian. Yellow eyes with cat-slit pupils regarded Buck with impatience. “Yes?” its deep, gargling-drain voice said.

Buck reached into his supply box and produced the standard-issue silver crucifix, then held it at arm’s length in front of him. “I command you and your acolyte, in the name of all that is holy, to leave the body of this boy in peace, amen, et cetera.”

The supervising demon blinked. “Yeah. Well, look, can you do me a big favor and not bust my chops here? I mean, the trainee’s gotta learn this possession jazz, right? You understand.”

Buck had expected this, so he put down the cross and retrieved a vial of holy water from the box, which he proceeded to open and sprinkle liberally onto Logan’s pudgy shins. The flesh sizzled a little, but remained unblemished. The demon rolled its eyes. “Hey, didn’t the kid just tell you that none of that stuff was going to work? You been watching too many Hammer movies or something?”

Buck pulled his worn Bible from the box and began reading from it, but he’d only got through one paragraph before the demon waved its hands for silence. “Okay, put a sock in it. I’ll make you a deal,” the supervisor growled. “Let the trainee do his possession thing, pass his test, get his certification, and then I promise we’ll leave the kid alone and go possess someone else. Would that make you happy?”

Before Buck could answer he realized that Logan’s mother had breezed into the room and was standing so close behind him that he could feel her breath riffling his hair. “Yes, Mr. Demon! Please leave Logan alone. In fact, why don’t you go possess that Taylor slut down the street? She’d probably enjoy it.”

Buck closed his eyes. The headache was starting to make him see stars. “Ma’am, if you’ll please let me handle this…”

The woman cast a furious glance down at Buck. “The demon offered a deal, and if you’re too pigheaded to take it, then I will.”

Buck was trying to explain to the woman that demons were actually not renowned for their honesty and their stringent keeping of promises, but she had already marched past him and planted herself directly in front of the demon, hands on hips, ass muscles clenched. “I agree to your compromise,” Logan’s mother intoned grandly.

“Well, hallelujah,” said the supervisor, and in a flash Logan’s face lost its lizardly appearance and reverted back to being puffy and green. “Hail Satan!” the trainee demon shouted exuberantly, then opened its froggy mouth wide and released a massive column of fire straight at Logan’s mother.

Buck instinctively shielded his eyes, but he could still feel the searing heat of the infernal flames as they consumed the woman utterly. She hadn’t even had time to scream.

When at last the heat had dissipated, leaving only a thick greasy stench like overdone pork, Buck reluctantly took his hands from his face and stared at the human-shaped tower of ash that teetered before him. When he exhaled, the tower collapsed into a cascade of papery black flakes that came to rest in a neat pile on the ecru carpet.

“Oops,” said the trainee demon.

The lizard face was back again, yellow eyes seeming to blaze like exploding suns. “Oops? Oops? Is that all you have to say for yourself? All you had to do was levitate the chair with the kid in it, maybe do a bit of freaky writing across his pasty midsection, but no! You had to go torch an innocent woman who’ll be going to heaven now, her soul lost to us forever! Junior demon third class, you fail!”

The green face returned blubbering. “But sir, it was just an accident…let me try again…”

“Try again? You’ll be lucky if I let you scrape old hoof shavings off the bottom of the Styx. Now come on!” Logan’s face went through one more horrible transformation, from reddish rage-filled lizard to sobbing greenish egg sac, and then he was just a regular boy again, his cheeks pink from exertion. His stomach rumbled and he looked down at it.

Buck was still sitting in his chair, unable to process what had just happened. A strange wind, perhaps caused by the departure of the demons, stirred the pile of ashes and scattered them in a pattern that looked sort of like an angel, if you squinted hard. Buck stuck his toe into the pile. Well, there goes my commission, he thought glumly.

Logan, who had been watching Buck’s actions with an elaborate lack of interest, took one last look at the blackened cinders that had once been his mother. Then he turned his chair toward the television, stuffed the rest of the Ho-Ho into his mouth, and picked up his video game controller.

The Goddess Revisits Season Two of “Masters of Horror”

12 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 1 Comment

Just as a quick reminder, I’ve put up a Patreon campaign to raise some much-needed funds for my writing endeavors, so take a look if you missed my previous post, and give something if you can, would you? Thank you.

Now, since I went into the specifics of “Masters of Horror” in my previous post about season one, I’m just going to jump right in and begin discussing season two, the rewatch of which I just completed. The quality of the second season of Mick Garris’s generally excellent series was a lot more consistent than the first, in the sense that there were no particularly terrible episodes, but there weren’t really any jaw-dropping, “Imprint”-quality ones either, though many of them were quite good, and all were at least decently watchable.

The season two revisit has been a little more fun for me and has provided a slightly different perspective on the show, since the God of Hellfire became interested in this fucked-up series I was obsessively watching and decided he wanted to watch some of it too. So I’ll be providing a little of his insight on the episodes, when he provided it. And now, onward.

THE DAMN GOOD

There were two episodes that, for me, stood out as being the best examples of what season two had to offer. The first was “Family,” directed by John Landis and featuring the lovable George Wendt (of “Cheers” fame) playing brilliantly against type as a suburban serial killer and corpse collector. I’m not entirely sure if the concept for this story was at least partly inspired by Miriam Allen deFord’s 1961 short story “A Death in the Family,” which it strongly reminded me of and which was made into an episode of “Night Gallery” back in 1971. John Landis’s “Family” ends up going off in a different direction entirely, though, and has a great twist ending. George Wendt imbues his schlubby, lonely bachelor psychopath with such pathos that it’s hard not to feel bad for him, even while he’s killing little girls and old ladies to deflesh and add to his happy skeletal family. Twisted, tragicomic, and great.

Norm realizes the folly of storing the hydrochloric acid on the shelf right next to the lavender bath oil.

The second standout of season two, the Rob Schmidt-directed “Right To Die,” recalled the furor over the Terri Schiavo case and starred the terrific Martin Donovan, who I’ve been a fan of since his numerous appearances in Hal Hartley’s films in the eighties and nineties. Donovan plays a dentist who has been cheating on his wife with his buxom assistant; shortly after the wife finds out, she and her wayward husband are involved in a terrible car accident in which all of the wife’s skin is burned off. Initially engaging in a legal battle with his mother-in-law for the right to turn off his wife’s life support, Dr. Adulterer soon changes his tune when it comes to light that his wife is now able to open up an enormous can of supernatural scorned-woman whoop-ass whenever she flatlines. Since I’m always down to see a cheater (and worse, as it turns out) get his just desserts, this episode was a satisfying, gory, and somewhat surprising ride.

In an attempt to be edgy, Smokey Bones new barbecue menu took things just a bit too far.

THE PRETTY DAMN GOOD

Several of the other episodes, while not quite to the caliber of the aforementioned, were still reliably entertaining. “Sounds Like,” directed by Brad Anderson from a short story by Mike O’Driscoll, was in the words of the GoH “like a really, really good ‘Twilight Zone’ episode,” and recounted the sad tale of a suburban middle-manager type guy who loses his son to a rare heart condition and subsequently develops hypersensitive hearing that eventually drives him insane. Very low-key in the gross-out department, but a nice slow burn of suspense and escalating tension.

“Pro-Life,” John Carpenter’s taut tale of a determined, fifteen-year-old pregnant girl and a demonic battle in a besieged abortion clinic, was also pretty fantastic, with Ron Perlman giving a chilling performance as the girl’s fundie nutbag father. Intense, violent, and genuinely frightening, even if the whole “devil-baby” angle is a touch cheesy.

Dario Argento’s “Pelts” was the Italian maestro’s second contribution to the series, adapted from a short story by F. Paul Wilson. The somewhat ridiculous premise sees a fur trader (played by Meat Loaf!) getting his hands on some beautiful raccoon pelts that magically make everyone who works with them do unbelievably gory things to themselves that mirror what was done to the dead animals. Squicky, over the top (it IS Argento, after all), and lots of fun.

He would do anything for love, including giving you the shirt off his back, or the skin off his torso, or something.

The Joe Dante-directed “Screwfly Solution,” while not nearly as stupidly overblown as his first-season “Homecoming,” still tackled hot-button sociopolitical issues (feminism and male aggression, in this case), but in a far less obnoxious way than his first foray in the series. I thought it was still a bit too glib and a tad on the overly obvious side for my taste, but overall I quite enjoyed it, and the GoH chose it as his favorite episode of season two, so in deference to him I decided to place it in the “pretty damn good” category. The GoH is a big fan of apocalyptic-type scenarios in horror that are just barely plausible, so this tale of an unknown biological agent that ramps up male hostility to the point where the men are killing off all the women on earth, was right up his alley and scared him more than any of the other episodes. Also, SPOILER ALERT, it was aliens all along, and aliens are pretty much the GoH’s favorite thing in the whole wide galaxy, you guys; you don’t even know. I forgot to add that this episode featured both Jason “90210” Priestley AND Elliott “M.A.S.H.” Gould as high-echelon environmental scientists, which is probably something you can’t say about any other movie in history. So there’s that.

Also decent was “We All Scream for Ice Cream,” directed by Tom Holland from a short story by John Farris (with a teleplay by the great David J. Schow). Bearing shades of Stephen King’s It, this straightforward tale of supernatural revenge sees a mentally-slow but well-liked (and clown-clad) ice cream man “accidentally” killed by some miscreant children. Years later, a sinister ice cream van prowls the small town’s streets at night, seeking to revisit the sins of the fathers upon the sons, as it were. Well-executed and fairly creepy.

Rounding out the “pretty damn good” category, Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of “The Black Cat” featured Jeffrey Combs as a tormented Edgar Allan Poe living out (or is he?) a couple of his more famous short stories. I thought the ending was something of a cop-out, but I’ll forgive it (this time) because the performances and gore were solid (BAD KITTY!) and the episode as a whole was pretty great, with some brilliant comic touches. Likewise with “The Washingtonians,” directed by Peter Medak from a short story by Bentley Little. The premise was so utterly bizarre, and the execution so overdone and absurd, that it circled all the way around to being awesome again. Intensely gory, and one of the funniest—and easily the wackiest—episodes of the series.

American History Blechs.

Also quite good was the final episode, Norio Tsuruta’s “Dream Cruise.” Glacially paced, and pretty standard J-horror all around (complete with long-haired female wraith), but with a story that held a few surprises, lovely cinematography, and a nice creep factor. A worthy end to the series.

THE JUST OKAY AND THE DISAPPOINTING

A few of the episodes, while not bad per se, were just not as good as I was expecting, given the talent involved. As much as I adore the stories of Ambrose Bierce, for example, the Tobe Hooper-directed adaptation of “The Damned Thing” (with a teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson, no less) was not particularly engaging or memorable, making me question the decision to make it the inaugural episode of the second season.

masters-of-horror-serie-tv-s-2-the-damned-thing-04-g

You cursed brat! Look what you’ve done! I’m melting! Melting!

Also a disappointment, and for similar reasons, was “Valerie on the Stairs,” directed by series creator Mick Garris from a terrific short story by Clive Barker. I’m a huge fan of Barker’s stories and novels, but his fantastical creations are somewhat hit or miss when adapted to screen, and this one seemed more miss than hit. Tony “Candy Man” Todd played a fetching demon, and Christopher Lloyd was his pleasingly manic self, but the episode seemed flimsy, slightly repetitive, and a tad silly, with an anticlimactic ending let down by cheesy special effects.

The Mick Garris-directed “The V Word” (and I hate to say it, but Garris was kind of 0 for 3 on his own episodes of the series he created, in my opinion) was not a total waste of time, but not an experience I’d care to revisit, either. The V could have stood for literally anything else—vagina, perhaps, or velveteen, or vivisection, or even Vivian Vance, for fuck’s sake—and I would have enjoyed it more, but since the V stood for “vampire” (oh…those), I was less than enthused, especially when whiny teenage boys were added into the mix. Watchable, but overall, meh.

Soooooooooooo high.

And thus completes my revisited rundown of “Masters of Horror!” Agree? Disagree? Care to start a virtual fistfight over which were the best episodes? Let me know. Until then, as ever, Goddess out.

The Goddess Extends Her Tin Cup Like a Dickens Orphan

12 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Please, sir, may I have…more?

I know that somewhere deep in their black little hearts, the readers of this humble little blog (all three of them) have lain awake nights, wondering, “What can I, as a debased fan of a relatively unknown horror writer, do to contribute to the cause of evil in the world?” (or words to that effect). Well, I’m pleased to announce that, for less than the price of a vanilla bean frappuccino per month, you can give something to the horror community that might, one day, get you something vile and wonderful and meaningful to your interests. What that something is, I’m not entirely sure, but just roll with me here.

That’s right, like many other money-grubbing denizens of the internets, I have put up a Patreon campaign to scare up funds for my illustrious writing career. There are five tiers you may participate in to subsidize my terrible activities, and there are lots of little rewards you can collect on depending on the amount pledged, so you won’t feel like you’re gettin’ nothin’ for your contributions.

So please help, if you can. Any amount, however small, can make a difference. It’s just like the saying goes: Be the change you want to see in the world, or it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, or nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, or something. Now join me in a chorus of “Kumbaya” and throw a couple bucks my way. Thank you, and good day, sirs and ma’ams.

The Goddess Revisits Season One of “Masters of Horror”

7 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 2 Comments

We’re now in 2015, believe it or not, and jokes about when we can expect to be receiving our hoverboards aside, hopefully it will be a better one than the last. I realize I’ve been neglecting this blog a little, but as with most of you, I was busy over the holidays with just general holiday stuff as well as some of the more personal issues I briefly mentioned in a previous post, and I just never got around to updating this thing as often as I should have. But I’m resolving to do better, and to that end, I’ve decided to do something slightly different with my Favorite Horror Scenes series by discussing the 2005 television show created by Mick Garris, “Masters of Horror” (all episodes of which are available on Hulu for free, if you somehow missed them). This year marks the tenth anniversary of the show’s debut, so it seemed an opportune time for another run-through.

I distinctly remember there being a lot of buzz about this series in the horror community when it was first announced. I mean, these were going to be hour-long, uncensored, hardcore horror films based on stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Clive Barker, Joe R. Lansdale! Directed by legends like John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, Dario Argento! AND IT WAS ALL GONNA BE ON TV, YOU GUYS. Pay TV, sure, but TV nonetheless. There had really never been anything quite like it on television before, and I for one eagerly settled in to watch the moment it was available online.

At the time I enjoyed most of them quite a bit, though I found that ten years later very few of them had made a lasting impression. I had forgotten even some of the better episodes, so it was instructive to watch them all again, and gratifying that many of them were far better than I had remembered.

Just a pale wingless angel taking his eyeless Japanese man out for walkies, no biggie.

THE GOOD:

Case in point: Episode eight, the John Carpenter-directed “Cigarette Burns.” I hadn’t remembered anything about this episode at all, but on the rewatch it instantly moved into my top three of season one. A great deal of my enthusiasm may be due to the presence of Norman Reedus, who of course in subsequent years went on to megastardom for his role on “The Walking Dead,” but everything in this episode hit the right notes for me this time around. Udo Kier was his wonderful scene-chewing self as a reclusive squintillionaire who hires a man to procure the single remaining print of a mysterious film called La Fin Absolue du Monde, the first and only screening of which ended in madness and murder. There is genuine suspense, an eerie, menacing tone permeating the whole enterprise, and gore galore, including a memorable moment in which Udo Kier’s character threads his own intestines through the projector after his long-awaited viewing of the cursed film. Top notch.

Also very good and worth a mention: The Stuart Gordon-directed “Dreams in the Witch-House,” which very effectively captured the spooky, otherworldly feel of the Lovecraft tale it was based upon. There was also John Landis’s “Deer Woman,” which I remembered disliking the first time around but appreciated much more this time. It’s far more black comedy than straight horror, with a rather absurdist premise based on a Native American legend, but there was plenty of blood, and Brian Benben’s snark-spitting protagonist was hilarious. Lastly, and surprisingly, was Dario Argento’s “Jenifer,” which starred Steven Weber (who also wrote the teleplay, based on a Bruce Jones story). I’ve always been a big Argento fan, but I think we can all agree that his more recent output has been somewhat less than stellar. This episode, though, is quite decent, even though it honestly could have been directed by anyone. It dragged a bit in parts, but the story—about a man being slowly bewitched by a deformed succubus—was suitably disquieting, and the gore was nicely excessive.

The tragic consequence of epic beer goggles.

THE BAD:

Episodes I could have done without included, sadly, Mick Garris’s contribution to his own groundbreaking series. “Chocolate” had a flimsy story, lame execution, and just an overall feel of why-bother-ness. Boo. The only other episode I found unforgivable was Joe Dante’s “Homecoming.” Zombies as political satire can be done well, but this came across as so heavy-handed as to be utterly ridiculous, even though I happen to agree with the film’s political stance. Added to that is the fact that the subject matter, current at the time, now comes across as terribly dated and not very relatable. Thea Gill’s ballbusting Ann-Coulter-alike was amusing (and her fate at the end satisfying), but otherwise, damn, tone it down some. You can actually make a point without smashing us upside the head with a wrecking ball, y’know.

He returned from the dead to vote, but the miracle of his resurrection was nothing in the face of Diebold.

THE OKAY:

I enjoyed most of the others, though they didn’t stand out as much as they probably could have. The David J. Schow-written, Larry Cohen-directed “Pick Me Up” was pretty good, with a decent premise (competing serial killers), some genuinely tense scenes, and the always-welcome presence of Fairuza Balk. “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road,” directed by Don Coscarelli from a story by Joe R. Lansdale, was also very watchable and included a fantastic turn by Angus “Tall Man” Scrimm. Lucky McKee’s “Sick Girl” was creepy-crawly fun, with a pleasingly awkward performance by Angela Bettis as a lovelorn lesbian entomologist. The Clive Barker adaptation “Haeckel’s Tale,” directed by John McNaughton, was good, but could have been better given the source material. Same with “Dance of the Dead,” which, given the status of all those involved—story by Richard Matheson, teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson, direction by Tobe Hooper, the appearance of Robert Englund as a depraved club owner— should have been incredible, but instead was just serviceable and somewhat disjointed. “The Fair-Haired Child,” finally, was entertaining but ultimately not all that memorable.

You would tell me if I had something on my forehead, right?

THE AMAZING:

You didn’t actually think I was going to leave this one off, did you? Slated to air as the last episode of season one, Takashi Miike’s “Imprint” was already notorious well before its air date, because Showtime (who carried the series) refused to broadcast it, due to its highly disturbing subject matter and intensely graphic violence. It was released to DVD in the latter part of 2006, and is now available on Hulu as part of the regular series. It’s easy to see why Showtime balked (even though they should have known what to expect from Miike, frankly), but it’s also sort of a shame, because this is the best episode of the series by a mile.

Komomo realized, upon reflection, that bobbing for knitting needles was perhaps not the best idea she’d ever had.

Pretty much the entirety of the story takes place inside a Japanese brothel, where an American journalist (played by Billy Drago) has traveled in search of the great love of his life, a prostitute named Komomo who he had promised to rescue and take back to America. Instead, he finds another prostitute with a disfigured face who tells him the increasingly convoluted tale of what happened to the doomed Komomo. The flashback scenes of Komomo’s torture (for supposedly stealing the madam’s jade ring) are horrific, and even a seasoned horror hound like myself could barely get through them, wincing and turning my head away more than once (and yes, you may call me a weenie all you like, but aaaaaaggggggghhhhhhhhh). Additionally, the deformed girl’s recounting of her own wretched childhood, particularly the scenes of her mother dumping aborted fetuses out of a bucket into a stream, were intensely uncomfortable for me, since I had been through my own abortion only a few weeks prior and was still feeling a little strange about it. At the end of the episode, I felt as though I had been run over by a bus, in a good way, if that makes any sense. The best horror should, after all, shake you out of your complacency, and touch you in places where you’d rather not be touched. “Imprint” succeeded on that score in motherfucking spades. A genius piece of filmmaking, but one I probably won’t watch again for another ten years or so, if ever.

Hopefully you enjoyed this rundown! I’m on the third episode of my season two revisit, so keep watching this space for another fun summary to come. Until then, happy 2015, and Goddess out.

The Goddess’s Favorite Creepy Movie Scenes, or Kin To A Mannequin

20 Nov 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

I’ve talked on this blog before about the concept of the “uncanny valley,” how things that look almost like humans—but not quite—are intensely disturbing to most of us. I think this aspect of human psychology is one reason why horror films featuring dolls, dummies, realistic robots and the like are so common, and more often than not, end up being pretty effectively scary. With that in mind, today I’d like to discuss a lesser-known gem from the 1970s that does something a little different with that tried and true horror standby: creepy dolls, or in this case, creepy mannequins. (And no, I’m not referring to that Crow T. Robot favorite starring Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall, so get that out of your mind right now.)

While the underrated Tourist Trap (1979) may fall into the very common horror genre of “group of sexy teenagers gets lost in a remote area, slaughter ensues,” its premise is actually fairly weird and its imagery creepily effective; even its goofball musical score lends to its offbeat charm. The five young people in question have been driving through the desert to some unspecified vacation destination, utilizing two vehicles. The first vehicle, containing Woody (Keith McDermott) and his girlfriend Eileen (Robin Sherwood) gets a flat, and Woody blithely rolls the likewise flat spare tire off to find a gas station. We see him enter what appears to be an abandoned store, calling out for service. He hears something in the back, and because this is a horror movie, he goes to investigate. He sees what appears to be a person under a blanket, but when he touches the person the blanket falls away revealing a freaky-looking and apparently spring-loaded mannequin. Then shit starts to go REALLY awry, as more cackling mannequins start popping out of closets and in through windows, the door locks by itself, chairs and other furniture start rattling around like in one of those poltergeist videos on YouTube. A cabinet starts opening and closing, and then glass bottles start flying out and smashing all around Woody’s head, and the fun part is, he can’t move, because his arm is through a hole in the door and someone seems to be holding him in place. At last, an iron bar that’s been shimmying around on the floor shoots toward Woody and impales him through the side. It’s an unsettling scene, and effective because you’re not quite sure what’s going on here…is there some supernatural force at work? Or does some killer get off on setting up elaborate pranks like some kind of murderous funhouse?

Well, are you having fun yet?

We sort of find out what’s up as the story progresses. Eileen gets a ride with the second vehicle in the caravan when it passes by, and the four remaining vacationers head off in search of the wayward Woody. They see a sign pointing toward some sketchy-looking museum and surmise that he must have gone that-a-way, but before they get there, their Jeep also breaks down in a clearing. As the sole male, Jerry (Jon Van Ness) gets stuck trying to figure out what’s wrong while the women wander off and naturally end up skinny dipping in a lovely waterfall-fed pool that’s hidden back in the woods. As they thrash around all naked and gratuitous, they notice that a kindly-looking but shotgun-wielding old man is watching them from the bank, with much amusement. From just above his down-home overalls, his pretty mouth tells them that his name is Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors), that he runs the little museum they saw the sign for earlier, and that no one has really been around there since the new highway got put in and he’s really kind of bummed out about it. He actually seems a pretty nice fella, and he doesn’t seem to mind that the girls are sloughing their boobies through his pond, though he warns them that they should probably get out before it gets dark because the pond is full of water moccasins. He then heads back into the woods as the women make Mr. Yuck faces at each other and haul ass out of the snake-water.

The look of a woman who just imagined what it would feel like to have a poisonous serpent swim up her jacksie.

When they get back to the car, Mr. Slausen is helping Jerry with the Jeep. He says he needs his tools from the house, and offers to give the youngsters something to drink and a place to chill out if they’ll all just pile into his truck and come back to his house/museum. Red flag? Sure, but Slausen does seem like a genuinely nice man, and he actually hasn’t done anything the least bit sinister, so even though the kids are a little reluctant, they end up going with him, because there would be no movie if they didn’t.

And here we finally get to the creepy-ass part of the flick, because Slausen’s little house is just full of kinda-cool-but-also-fairly-disturbing animatronic mannequins. Some of them are gunslingers that turn and shoot at each other, one is a pretty lady in a white dress tucked into a lighted shrine that turns out to be a representation of his late, much-adored wife. It’s initially sort of weird, but the way Slausen talks about his wife and breaks down crying is so sincere that at least one of the women, Molly (Jocelyn Jones), really starts to feel bad for him.

Portrayed: Daddy issues.

Of course, you can see where this is going. One by one, the youngsters wander off alone for one reason or another and get either straight-up murdered or taken captive by a heavyset dude in a wig and an eerie-looking mannequin mask. It’s here that the movie is really at its most effective, because the killer, as well as the shadowed shots of the mannequins, are intensely skin-crawling. It’s also worth noting that the killer, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, has telekinetic powers, and can sic mannequins on people and make their mouths drop open in a really, REALLY unsettling way.

Like so.

Although for the bulk of the movie’s running time, you’re meant to believe that it’s Slausen’s crazy brother who has suddenly snapped and started offing people and adding them to his mannequin collection, viewers will not be surprised to learn that it was actually Slausen doing the killin’ all along.

This is actually a good look for him.

Despite the movie’s obvious telegraphing, the whole atmosphere of the thing is what makes it great, and I have to say that Chuck Connors puts in a really noteworthy performance here, since his character really does believably seem like a sweet but slightly addled old man who then turns out to be a raging psycho by the end. Though he gets his just desserts at the hands of Final Girl Molly (who was of course the most prudish of the group, and also the one who showed the most compassion for Slausen), the closing scene makes it clear that Molly was all but broken by her horrible experience, as she tools down the highway in a convertible with a freaky grin on her face AND THE MANNEQUINS OF ALL HER DEAD FRIENDS IN THE CAR WITH HER. So yeah. The 70s were a strange time, kids.

A strange time with excessive amounts of strange drugs.

Until next time, keep reading, keep watching, and try to keep away from any run-down mannequin-centric museums, okay? Until next time, Goddess out.

What’s Scarier in a Horror Movie: Realism or Supernaturalism? Also, The Goddess Picks Her Top 20 Scariest Supernatural Films

6 Nov 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

I have loved the horror genre for as long as I can remember, and I have been a skeptic of the supernatural for almost as long. But therein lies an interesting contradiction, for as regular readers of this blog will no doubt have gathered, I am most often frightened by horror films featuring supernatural elements, particularly ghosts, demons/the Devil, and witches, even though I emphatically do not believe that any of those things exist.

Why should this be? Logically, you would assume that people in general would be most terrified by a film that portrays something that could actually happen, or that they at least believe could actually happen. By this criteria, for example, movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hostel, Wolf Creek, or The Last House on the Left, by virtue of being realistic, should be far scarier than anything that features a white-clad wraith drifting through the halls of a decaying Victorian mansion.

This is not so in my case, and I’m curious as to whether it’s true with other fans of horror. Please do not take this to mean that I’m not a fan of more realistic horrors, because I definitely am. I do not, however, find these movies particularly frightening, and I’ve always wondered why. Why should I be so disturbed by situations and images in film that I’m certain will never happen to me in real life? Is it because I have a greater handle on reality than I do on my own subconscious? Is it simply because I’m more terrified by the unknown than the known-but-horrible? I’d really like some insight into this conundrum, so here’s a poll that you may participate in if you’re so inclined:

Also, if you’d care to expound upon any theories as to why you feel the way you do about the horror movies that scare you the most, then please share them in the comments, because I really am curious and would like to get a discussion going.

And now, because I want to, I present a collage of my Top 20 Scariest Supernatural Movies, in no particular order. How many can you identify? Again, answer in the comments! Until next time, Goddess out.